All wargames look forward
and do so in the context of
pertinent history. What we
needed to do was go back
and examine the frequency
of various kinds of missions
the military had been asked
to carry out over the
previ-ous decade.
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57completion, especially if it was a major operation. Troops would need leave or retraining or, more likely, both; equipment would re-quire reconditioning or replacement.
Keep in mind that scenarios overlapped with one another. That was the point: Our job was to reflect the real world as best we could by examining the past and projecting it forward not with precise replication but with creative wrinkles based on previous missions.
We did not have time to use all the scenarios, but we and our mili-tary client used enough of them to learn some important lessons.
In preparation for the games and certainly during them, we lit-erally had to keep track of where the U.S. military’s people and equipment were: all the personnel units, planes, ships, tanks, ar-tillery pieces, and much more. We didn’t count the number of bul-lets out there, but we probably could have gotten pretty close if we’d tried. What we found was that the military did not really know where everything was at any given point in time. It had a fairly good idea, and technology was helping the logisticians get better, but there was room for improvement.
That was an important “learning” because the larger lesson was that although the force could execute the national defense strategy, the force structure was “fragile.” That was the word used by three of our military colleagues—Commander Clarence E. Carter of the Navy, Colonel Philip D. Coker of the Army, and Colonel Stanley Gorenc of the Air Force—in an article they wrote about Dynamic Commitment for a National Defense University think tank. We dis-covered that in a stressed military, even one with superb forces and equipment, stuff breaks. What was the average time of deploy-ments overseas for active-duty personnel? The average time re-serves were called up? How often was the National Guard required to fill in for the regular Army? The numbers in Dynamic Commit-ment added up and raised at least a provisional red flag. As Carter, Coker, and Gorenc wrote: “Sequential deployments to smaller-scale contingencies may have cumulative, negative impacts on the all-volunteer force.”
In that context, we found in Dynamic Commitment an entire
58 M I L I T A R Y W A R G A M E S
category of people and equipment we call high-demand, low-den-sity, or HD-LD. These are things that are often very expensive—say a special satellite communications relay—and generally unneeded in abundance for any particular operation. As a result, you may not have many of them, but over a decade, with a military asked to re-spond to a wide range of scenarios, you need them often enough that you run out in, say, year 6. You might even have backup equip-ment, but chances are that it isn’t as good. What about the special surveillance aircraft that are always in use? If you do not have enough trained pilots in the assignment rotation, you have a system that will break, perhaps at a moment when lives are on the line.These are not real examples drawn directly from a specific wargame, but they suggest what we found: a range of things, peo-ple, and pieces of hardware that the military did not have enough of. We also found a bunch of items with a different kind of imbal-ance—an imbalance between abundant supply and so-so demand.
But it is the first category—high demand, low density—that should concern military planners. Operational units and equip-ment tend to become less effective in protracted periods of stress.
As this book is being written, we need only examine the strain placed on our superb fighting forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. The initial wars in both countries removed an enemy from power quickly and with few problems. But the lengthy occupation of Iraq, which includes long troop deployments and asymmetric warfare as we fight insurgents, and the continuing battles against the Tal-iban and Al-Qaida surrogates in Afghanistan have plainly stressed the force, particularly the Army and Marine Corps.
U
ntil Desert Storm in 1991, information and communications were important and interesting, but they were not treated with the same reverence as a major weapons system. If it camedown to making the choice, military planners would never cut out a fighter program or a line of ships to make room for communications. However, Desert Storm, the Gulf War, demon-strated that command, control, and communication—C3, for short—had greater utility and mobility than pre-viously thought. The networking of systems was beginning to prove its mettle. It was one thing to call a pilot in his or her plane and verbally issue a command. It was a different order of magnitude to move targeting and in-telligence information around to large
numbers of pilots or other personnel in very short periods of time—in some cases, the time it takes to make a keystroke. C3 (C4 when computers were added routinely) hadn’t reached maturity, but it wasn’t in its adolescence either.
We did a series of wargames in the early and middle 1990s called
“Nimble Vision,” the objective of which was to examine the value of information. This is one series in which the scenarios and details are off limits, but we want to mention it briefly because the subject has grown in importance in the years since we did the games.
Information is not a kinetic force; some may consider it vacu-ous, something without substance. However, our charge was to see whether there was a way to measure the value of information against the value of “real” things: that fighter program, those ships, these bombs, or that personnel unit. This was not necessarily a zero-sum exercise in the sense that, say, an information network, valued highly, meant that a weapons system was destined for the scrap heap. Still, what we sought was an assessment of the impact and added value of information systems for the entire enterprise. Also, we were working in a budget-constrained universe. Depending
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